It’s been a year! In addition to all the big news of the world, I spent much of 2023 going slowly but inexorably blind with early onset cataracts. But a bit of surgical intervention finally patched me up, and now I’m better. To celebrate (and because I’ve fallen way behind on my posting goals), let me talk about some of the wonderful fiction I still managed to read, even if at times very slowly and with much squinting.

This is a mostly fantastical list (escapism *ON*) including a variety of different and weird takes on how to do fantasy, together with lots of humour and romance where I can find it (and lots of different kinds of couples). My descriptions are breezy, but each of these books is worth a standalone essay of the sort I tried to give to Terry Pratchett not so long ago. Sadly, I just don’t have time. But good news! It’s (probably) not too late to support these authors by buying their books as gifts. I purchased most of these beauties at my local bookseller, White Dwarf Books. But I’m imagining a blog readership beyond Vancouver, so I’m going to just link to author websites below, in no particular order of who you should be reading:

Alix Harrow – I’ve been a fan of Harrow’s work ever since I came across one of her short stories. My admiration has only grown through her wonderful The Thousand Doors of January and The Once and Future Witches (the unexpectedly familiar magic, the prose that wraps a favourite blanket around lovable protagonists). I was surprised and super-excited by the arrival of Starling House at my local bookseller’s, and I immediately snatched it up. Flawed heroine in Kentucky gothic? I’m in. Maybe it’s because I’d just returned from a big ole’ extended family reunion in small town Kentucky prior to reading, but I loved this book at least as much as her others, and they were already at the top of my recommendations list.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia – I first came to Moreno-Garcia’s work through Gods of Jade and Shadow, a kind of fantastical travelogue through the gods experiencing Jazz Age Mexico which I really enjoyed. I’ve read several of her other books since, but it took me awhile to get to The Beautiful Ones. The story line evokes Jane Austen, and contains a similar study of manners of the old and new rich wrapped up in a romance, but also containing just the right amount of the fantastic for my taste. I kind of want to teach a sociology class on it now.

C.L. Polk – I loved C.L. Polk’s Witchmark, and finally caught up to her last book in the trilogy, Soulstar. What I really admire about Soulstar is just how seriously Polk leads her main character through a series of “how do we fix things” plot points, mirrored within a key romance. That’s not to say there isn’t also a lot of excitement in the book, but there’s also an appreciation for fixing all the stuff that gets broken amidst the excitement. Bonus: also check out Polk’s The Midnight Bargain (which I’m pretty sure I read before last year, but is a pitch-perfect romantic comedy plunked down within a fantasy setting).

T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon - Ever since I picked up Nettle & Bone, my partner and I (and her sister) have devoured any and everything from T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, but for adults). I’d read the multi-talented Vernon’s delightful Digger web-comic ages ago, though it took me awhile to put two and two together with the author of the even more delightful (and darkly funny) fairy tale, Nettle & Bone. Since then, we’ve leapt at every T. Kingfisher book we could find, and they’re not always easy to find, but totally worth it. Check out the Swordheart and Paladin series for great fantasy romances (of all types) blending a strong sense of humour with a real eye for the weirdness behind the best fairy tales.

Leigh Bardugo – My household has read through pretty much all of Bardugo’s Grishaverse series now, starting from Six of Crows (which is kind of in the middle, but a great place to start, especially for my voracious and Kaz Brekker-loving 13-14 year old). Just finished Rule of Wolves, and I kind of want Bardugo to allow her vividly drawn but trouble-plagued young characters some well-deserved rest (even as I also want to read about them getting through yet another impossible scrape).

Nghi Vo – Do you have a fondness for The Great Gatsby, but also fantasy? Are you a bit disturbed by the vacuousness of rich white people obsessing over their love lives at the same time as history sours around them? Check out The Chosen and the Beautiful. The cleverness of this novel and its really haunting imagery have stayed with me. That’s some good magic.

Ann Leckie – Good set up for The Raven Tower! Where Vo riffs on Gatsby, Leckie riffs on Hamlet, but from a delightful perspective I never would have considered. This is a book that rewards a little bit of patience with a long and fantastic build up. Especially rewarding for fans of Terry Pratchett‘s Small Gods and (strangely enough) American Werewolf in London. I haven’t yet read Leckie’s acclaimed science fiction, but after picking up The Raven Tower, I’ll be winging my way over shortly.

R.F. Kuang – After reading The Poppy War, I could not resist the call of R.F. Kuang’s Babel, tackling some of the same historical matter, but from a very different (and really enticing!) magical system. This is a book for the former English major in me (well before my turn to Sociology), placing the fundamental ambiguity of translation as the heart of the fantastic. As with The Poppy War, Kuang starts with a kind of riff on a (much better) version of the boarding school fantasy Harry Potter should have been, before tearing it all apart. Violently.

Travis Baldree – If you’re called to a more lighthearted fantasy book engaged with putting things together rather than tearing them apart, then Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes might be for you. The book is set in a kind of Dungeons & Dragons-ish world of adventurers (familiar to me from my youth, and now once-again very familiar to my 13-14 year old). But Baldree is interested in what adventurers do when they retire from the violence and try to make a life for themselves among the “normal” folk (where normal encapsulates a surprising degree of variety). Bonus: lots of thought goes into how small entrepreneurs actually make things work.

Yangsze Choo – I think we loaned out Choo’s The Night Tiger to someone? Otherwise, it too would be making an appearance in my reading stack pictured above. The Night Tiger vividly evokes 1930s colonial Malaysia, with plucky Chinese protagonists drawn from the class of servants and upwardly mobile small shopkeepers positioned alongside a hospital run by British ex-pats. At turns gripping and darkly humorous, the plot unfolds against a backdrop of fantastical elements drawn from local lore.

Emily St. John Mandel – Not to spoil anything, but The Sea of Tranquility really tangled together with the two other Mandel books I’ve read, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. It’s great how the three books stand alone, but also operate like a weird trilogy, devoted to all who are lost. Though the books have very different feels, the time travel at the heart of the Sea of Tranquility also plays well with another book I enjoyed, This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone; a novel told in the poetry of love letters. This is another book I loaned out, which is why it doesn’t appear in the stack!

A.J. Hackwith – Finally, a trip to hell, but with librarians. And that makes all the difference. A.J. Hackwith’s The Library of the Unwritten centres the heroic librarians looking after all those books that never got finished (definitely an appealing kind of hell for an academic), as they find themselves cast forth into multidimensional adventure. This was a fun read that my partner also enjoyed. And now I see there are sequels!

A bit of non-fiction is stacked on top there, including works by Annalee Newitz (on Lost Cities!) and historians Matthew Gabriele & David Perry (The Bright Ages!), which I purchased both for myself and for the 13-14 year old in the household (he reads a lot). We both really enjoyed them. Happy to recommend these as well for the aspiring archaeology and history nerds out there. Bonus jaguar art from that same 13-14 year old’s past in the background. “Jag attaque!”

Happy New Year!